


Fall for a Song

by byjillianmaria



Series: Back Into Time [3]
Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-20 12:20:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19992103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/byjillianmaria/pseuds/byjillianmaria
Summary: The wall has fallen. His wife is gone.





	Fall for a Song

**Author's Note:**

> This is technically a sequel to [The Path to Paradise](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19357642), but you don't have to read that to understand this one. It's just a nice bit of context.

_“Show them a crack and they’ll tear down the wall.”_

He said that, once. He hadn’t really expected it to happen, and he especially hadn’t expected it to happen so _soon_. But here he is, kneeling alone in the ruins of his kingdom, coal staining his pants and his fingertips.

The wall has fallen. His wife is gone.

He doesn’t know how it happened. The wall, anyway. Wasn’t it just yesterday that it stood tall and proud, a beacon of his power, a shelter from the storm? And if it also happened to block out the sun, what of that? His lights shined bright enough to compete with foolish Apollo anyday.

But now his wall — his kingdom — it all lays in ruins. It isn’t blown apart as he imagined it might be, if a riot ever came — it’s cracked and fractured in a thousand places, as if people had been chipping away at it for years.

He would have noticed that. Wouldn’t he have?

A soft, warm breeze blows around him, stirring up coal dust. He doesn’t understand how the wall fell but he understands well enough how his wife is gone. He held her just before letting her leave, as if that could ever be enough. She was soft in his arms but awkwardly so, as if she had to relearn how to do it. Her curls had framed her face, her warm eyes more focused than he’d seen them in a long, long time.

_“Wait for me?”_

And he promised her. He did. But oh, that promise is going to be hard to keep. Already he itches to hold her again, to snatch her up and keep her by his side even if she hates him for it. Because without her, he’s alone with himself. He’s alone with his thoughts, and this time there will be no busy hands to help him.

There’s a sound, then. A clatter of moving rubble. He looks up and sees several people walking through one of the cracks, back into the ruins of Hadestown. They’re clean and dressed in clothes from up top, but he recognizes them as the workers that he once lured down. Not all of them — just a handful, no more than a dozen. He narrows his eyes at them.

“What do you want?”

They cast their gazes about, and he realizes with something almost like amusement that they’re looking for a leader. They’re lost, then, without him.

But then one steps forward — a woman with long, hanging braids that look almost like snakes when they sway in the distant breeze of wife’s spring. “This place can be something wonderful, Mr. Hades,” she tells him. Her voice is firm, but she doesn’t meet his eye. Her hands are curled into fists. “We don’t want to destroy it. We want to make it better.”

And he — he laughs, low and rough and more than a little desperate. His wife is gone, turned on him again, and these fools want to make his kingdom into something else entirely. They want to take the last thing that belongs to him and twist it.

But what does it matter _now_? Is it worth hanging onto with no walls and no workers?

“Do what you want.” And he stalks off to nurse his wounds.

_“I turn like a bird on a spit in my bed…”_

Days are agony, nights are torture. The boy’s song reminded him of his love, opened his heart to the ache of her leaving in a way that he hasn’t really allowed himself to feel in years. He can’t even numb his pain with drink — alcohol tastes too strongly of her.

Meanwhile, his kingdom warps and changes around him. And, just as with the wall, he has the strangest sense of confusion. The shops and homes and communities seem to spring up overnight, but they look as though they’ve been there all along. As if they’d been growing for months under his nose.

The workers — who are no longer workers but _volunteers_ — begin to try to plant crops. It’s absurd, so absurd that the sight of them drags him out of the office he’s been sulking in and onto the cracked earth.

“Nothing grows down here,” he tells them. A few hands still, but not many.

“Nothing’s ever tried,” the woman from before, the one with the dreadlocks that sway even with no breeze. She oversees the planting, head held high.

“The sun doesn’t _shine_ down here,” he tells them, because he _knows_ , he spent so long down here alone before Persephone came, just him and the dark.

“Then we’ll find another way,” the woman says. She doesn’t take her eyes off the workers — no, _volunteers_ — as they plant the seeds in neat rows.

Her certainty grates at him. “You don’t even need to eat,” he snaps, a little petulant. “Not when you’re down here.”

“Eating is nice,” she replies. “Besides, the folks up top need food. The seasons may be back in tune, but that doesn’t change the damage done. A lot of people are still hurting, Mr. Hades.”

There’s no reproach in her tone, not really, but the implication is still there for him to hear. He walks away without saying anything.

_“The harvest dies and people starve…”_

Persephone only ever brought up the starving mortals when they were fighting. He assumed that she was exaggerating for the sake of proving a point, that she was just lashing out in a fruitless attempt to hurt him. He isn’t so sure anymore.

Against all reason, the crops grow. He doesn’t care to understand why. When he sees the people from up top accept the food of the underworld with tears in their eyes, he wonders for the first time what would compel someone to take his train to Hadestown. To sign his contract willingly.

Once, eating food from this place would trap them here. People signed his contracts with the taste of pomegranate on their tongue. But the food made from the volunteer’s hands are as harmless as Persephone’s wine.

One day, he comes across a small plot of land that isn’t for food. Instead, a young man in overalls stained with dirt instead of coal plants flowers of every color. 

“What are you doing?”

The young man startles, which secretly pleases Hades, but only a little, which doesn’t. He turns and offers a sheepish smile. He’s pretty, and he looks at home among these flowers, the blooms in his hand as much a part of him as his blood and bone. “I’m planting flowers.”

“I can see that,” Hades replies, dry. “Why? What purpose do they serve?”

This question seems to surprise the young man. He blinks a few times, rapidly. “Well, they’re pretty.” He kneels down, patting the flowers into the Earth. “And I think that the Lady will like them when she comes back. Don’t you?”

And there’s something in his baseless, guileless optimism that cuts through to Hades’s core, just as certain as the poet’s song. “How do you know she’s coming back?”

The young man peers up at him. Once he’d have to shade his eyes from the bright lights, but now there’s only the too-distant, cold glow of the sun. “Because she always has.”

“Yes,” Hades replies. “And she’s always left.”

The young man looks at Hades, and it’s obvious that he doesn’t understand. Neither does Hades. He turns and walks away.

_“Turned on one too many times…”_

Hades sits alone in his study.

There’s nothing for him to do. There’s no place for him here, and that frightens him. He never had a place up top — his brothers did, commanded sky and sea alike, but none of that ever suited him. This was the only place that did, and now it doesn’t.

“Are you ever going to come out?”

The woman with the braids stands in his doorway. Her dark, narrow shoulders are squared, but she still doesn’t meet Hades’s eye.

“Leave me alone,” he growls, and there’s a note of his old danger in there but there’s no power to back it up.

“No.” She takes a step forward. She’s not afraid of him, and suddenly he wants that, very badly, because at least if someone’s afraid of him it means that someone is _seeing_ him, it means that he has control of _something_.

“Why _not_?” He roars, leaping to his feet. “You’ve taken everything from me. Isn’t that enough?”

For the first time, the woman looks at him. Her gaze is startling, direct. Her eyes are the color of stone, so steely that he freezes in place.

“I know what it’s like,” she says, her voice soft. “To be alone. You don’t have to be, Mr. Hades. Not everyone will forgive you — and they don’t owe you forgiveness — but some will. I will, if you let me. You don’t have to be alone for half the year. You can have a family here, if you want it.”

Family. His brothers never wanted him to be that, and he’d never thought much of them, either. No one thought of him as _anything_ until Persephone had taken pity on his heart, pulled him over her as she lay in the dirt. She was the only one who ever saw him. No wonder he’s nothing without her.

“I don’t know how,” he admits. His voice sounds very quiet, almost swallowed by the room.

The woman’s lips twitch in what’s almost a smile. “Well, you can start by asking me my name.”

He hangs his head. He’s so tired. Too tired to even try to fight this, even if he thought it would do any good. It won’t, really. His voice is a whisper-quiet admission of defeat.

“What’s your name?”

“Medusa,” she tells him.

And, somehow, it means something.

_“All alone, his blood runs thin…”_

Hades tries. It’s slow, and clumsy, and Medusa is right when she tells him that not everyone who came back to Hadestown forgives him for what he’s done. He accepts their hatred, their distrustful looks, their curt responses without rebuke. He’s no longer certain that he doesn’t deserve it.

They’re _living,_ is the thing. They’re wide awake with their heads raised high. And the shift in energy is palpable. If anything, they’re more productive doing this than they ever were in the mines, even if they go up top after the day is done.

They don’t always leave, either. Sometimes, some of them gather in Persephone’s bar for drinks. He can hear their laughter echoing, but can’t quite make himself go in. It reminds him too much of her, makes him ache for her all the more.

But one day, he approaches the garden.

The young man is still there, face smudged in dirt. He’s humming to himself, hand moving deftly in the soil. He looks remarkably at home here, reminding Hades so much of Persephone and the life they had before that he’s sure that any moment now his resolve will crumble and he’ll run away.

He doesn’t. And eventually, the young man notices him.

“Mr. Hades.” His tone is soft and respectful and there’s no fear there. Hades is surprised to note that he doesn’t really crave that, anymore. He’s not sure when that happened. “Can I help you?”

Hades opens his mouth, and for a moment nothing comes out, not unlike what the workers once experienced. But he’s not a shade, and he finally finds his voice. “Do you need help?”

The young man seems to consider this, then shrugs. “An extra pair of hands never hurts.” He gestures, vaguely, to some of the unplanted flowers.

Hades hesitates for a moment. He’d asked permission without even thinking about it. The underworld no longer feels like his and his alone. He’s not sure how he feels about that, anymore. He feels lost, adrift, frightened.

But not as frightened as he expected.

“What’s your name?”

This seems to startle the young man, his eyes widening a fraction of an inch. “Hyacinth,” he responds.

Hades nods. Then he kneels in the dirt. It smells of her, but the pain is no longer such an unwelcome thing. He welcomes it, welcomes the thoughts of her into his heart. He ignores the unplanted flowers and instead sings directly into the soil.

_“La, la la la la la la …”_

He doesn’t produce a flower every time he sings. He’s out of practice, and sometimes his heart is so heavy with doubt that the earth won’t respond to him. But, sometimes, he really focuses, remembering the scent of pollen on Persephone’s fingertips, the warmth of her shoulders from the sun. He remembers how it felt to _enjoy_ holding her, without worrying about the moment that he would have to let her go.

Slowly, red carnations begin to dot the garden, peeking out among the white and purple and blue. Some of them are a little smaller, their petals less perfect. But they’re all proof, proof that his love is real. They’re not as grand as his towers and mines, but he thinks of the way she looked at him when they danced, and he starts to think that maybe that’s not a bad thing.

“Orpheus and Eurydice got married, just recently,” Medusa says when she sees them. “Eurydice held a bouquet of those flowers in her hands.”

Hades nods, and doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t think of the poet and the songbird much, these days. Even the song wasn’t one that really belonged to them. It was just one that Hades had forgotten.

“You don’t seem upset by that,” Medusa notes.

“I never really wanted them to fail,” Hades admits, quiet. “I wanted to believe that his love was strong enough. For him to wait.”

Medusa understands. She must. But she doesn’t say anything, just stares at him with those alarming stone-colored eyes.

“I just wasn’t expecting it to be so _easy_ for them,” he adds hastily, not quite grumbling.

Medusa’s eyes take on a strange, faraway sort of look. It’s one he doesn’t quite understand, but it happens sometimes, when he talks about how quickly the kingdom fell, how fast the wall crumbled.

“I don’t think it was easy at all,” Medusa says, softly, and he lets the matter rest. Maybe some things aren’t for him to understand.

_“I hear the rocks and stones echoing our song…”_

The garden becomes his place as much as Hyacinth’s, gently humming with the song of his and Persephone’s love. Sometimes, red carnations bloom without him there to help them.

The garden isn’t the only place he spends his time, however. Medusa is constantly dragging him around the new underworld. She doesn’t push or force him into places he doesn’t want to be, like the bar. But she’s constantly trying to get him to see what his kingdom has become, the crops and the communities. She tries to get him to make friends with the people who will have him.

Finally, he snaps at her. “Can’t you just leave me be?”

She gives him that _look_ , the stony gaze that’s impossible to run from. “Mr. Hades, if you spend all your time waiting for your wife to come back, you’ll go crazy.”

He stares at her, uncomprehending. “But I _miss_ her.”

His tone isn’t self-pitying or plaintive. The ache for his wife is always there, impossible to ignore. It’s as much a part of him as the tattoos on his arms or the twinge in his neck from too many years with his head kept low.

Medusa’s gaze softens. “I know you do. It’s _good_ that you do. But, Mr. Hades, she can’t be the only good thing in your life. That’s an unfair burden to put on her.”

And he doesn’t understand — how can his _love_ be a burden? But Medusa has a way of saying things that creep up on him later, and when he lays in bed that night, he tries to imagine what he must look like from his wife’s point of view.

He’s not the only good thing in _her_ life. She has the sun, the flowers, the fresh air. She has life up top, and she cherishes it as much as the one that she has with him down below. Can he be content with that — with allowing her to love both of them fully, in different ways?

He’s not sure. But he tries. He allows Medusa to drag him around, to explain how the crops and the flowers are managing to grow — even if that explanation flies over his head. He learns the names of the people underground who want to talk with him. He learns their stories.

Slowly, he smiles. The nights become tolerable, and the days — sometimes — become enjoyable.

But he never stops missing her, in spite of all that.

_“How long, how long, how long?”_

He sits in the garden. Medusa doesn’t bother him, either busy or content enough to let him be, and Hyacinth isn’t there, either. He’s alone, but that’s no longer such a hardship. He can hear their song, the reminder of his love, and beyond it, the chatter of the volunteers. Laughter and mirth. The new symphony of Hadestown.

He tips back his head, closing his eyes. There’s still so much he doesn’t understand. He still feels lost, and alone, and unseen. Sometimes he still wants to take control again, to lash out and hurt so that the ache isn’t contained to his chest alone.

But that impulse is getting easier to ignore. And as he learns more about the volunteers, as he starts to see them as more than tools, he begins to understand why he _should_ ignore it.

There’s a soft sound, almost a gasp. He recognizes the voice even before he whips his head up, his heart in his throat.

Persephone stands in the entrance of the garden, clutching her suitcase so hard that her knuckles pale. She’s still in her green dress, her boots stained with soil. There’s a flower in her hair. Her eyes dart from one red flower to another, understanding etched in the small, fine lines around her eyes.

“It’s you,” he says, dumbly. Her gaze snaps to him.

“It’s me.” She smiles, something soft and hesitant that looks almost out of place on her wild, untamed face. “Hades?”

“Persephone.”

And then he’s on his feet, going to her, and she’s throwing her suitcase to the side as though it couldn’t matter less to her. They meet in the center of the garden, her arms around his waist, his fingers in her hair.

“You waited,” she says, her voice quiet against his chest, almost wondering. She sounds just like she did that first night, so much so that he almost wants to have her right here in the dirt again. But holding her like this is so sweet, he can’t quite bring himself to part from her to ask properly. Instead he just holds her, and he doesn’t think about letting her go.

The flowers in the garden are still bright, but from up top he can smell the crisp scent of approaching autumn.

_"And brother, you know what they did? They danced."_


End file.
